Episode 15: Good vs Evil – The Arch Nemesis

Here’s an episode where I ramble a lot. It’s been the source of some minor debate around the SpaceQuest.net forums, but I thought I’d take it up a notch and really ramble my balls off on the subject of “whether Sludge Vohaul is Roger Wilco’s nemesis or not.” Because, damn it, I feel strongly about this. Well, maybe not that strongly. But I do ramble.

I also get into some of the comments that were left for me following the last episode, namely about episodic gaming. This really seems to gel in uncomfortable ways for some fans; and I made the mistake of saying that Broken Age didn’t seem to get so much flak for being broken up in episodes when, in fact, it kind of seems it did. But I wouldn’t say it’s overwhelmingly negative reactions — there are a lot of supporters who understand the reasoning behind the episodic nature of that game, so … ah, well. I’m not here to make conclusions. I just report the news. (Thanks, Kevin Patrick, for the dirt. You dirty man. 😉 )

Anyway, moving on to the fun we’re having with Serena Nelson and Pete Toleman. They’re still at it with regards to the whorehouse simulator Pete wanted to make, which has now turned into a haunted house simulator. And while Serena is trying to salvage all the harebrained ideas Pete has for making money, Pete’s already moved on to the next thing: compulsory strategy guides (of course sold separately).

From a behind-the-scenes perspective, we’ve already planned out the ‘story arc’ for the Priapic saga for the whole season, and I’m really excited every time these two people send in their contributions for the episodes, because even though the individual episodes’ story bits are worked out, there’s no script — other than what these two great people think of on the day of recording! So it’s as much of an excitement to me, listening to these two people bicker on my answering machine, as it hopefully is to you listeners — because I have no idea what I’m getting!

In fact, Serena made me break out the ol’ “SQ4 points” noise for the first time since season 2 began because the girl has a dirty mouth. 😉

And then there’s some stuff about the Space Quest III soundtrack from Mark Seibert and James Mulvale (I really dig the Orbital-percussion on James’ version; I do hope he follows through on his threat of opening the track up for remixing — I could have fun with that!). This is all followed by me rambling on about the differences between MIDI and tracker music. Since SQ3 was also released on Amiga, that means some poor soul sat down and recreated the entire soundtrack in Amiga’s MOD format. And, being an old-school tracker myself, I couldn’t help but find that incredibly fascinating.

If there’s anyone out there that has the complete Amiga soundtrack for Space Quest III lying around, please don’t hesitate to throw it my way!

And, finally, we catch up with Josh Henry’s fan fiction tale that we ditched two chapters in last season. But you’re not getting off that easy. Josh has a nice little quick recap for you, and then he gets into the dig of things with special appearances from Say Mistage and Steven “Blackthorne” Alexander. (Not in person, mind you. But Josh does their voices. Which is hilarious in its own damn right.)

Next time we’ll be talking about whether Roger Wilco is a hero or not, which is always good fun. So happy trails, everybody — I’ll see you time jockeys in two weeks!